by P.S SITNEY
Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet on location during the filming of Moses und Aron (Moses and Aaron), 1975, Alba Fucense, Italy, August 1974 PHOTO/Bernard Rubenstein/Austrian Film Museum
The films of Jean-Marie Straub (1933–) and Danièle Huillet (1936–2006) are works of exquisite beauty, startling originality, and exceptional rigor, and they constitute a testing ground for any possible theory on literature’s essential relationship to cinema. No other filmmakers have attempted to bring to the screen such a distinguished array of texts—Kafka, Pavese, Hölderlin, Brecht, Vittorini, Dante, Corneille, Schönberg, Sophocles, Mallarmé, Montaigne, Cézanne—and none have demonstrated such independence from the traditions of adaptation.
Straub-Huillet’s persistent and uncompromising oeuvre—some thirty films, long and short, from Machorka-Muff of 1963 to Europa 2005, 27 Octobre of 2006 (the last film the couple completed before Huillet’s death)—constitutes the most massive and the most diverse array of modernist narrative cinema, even though its authors profess to care little for modernism. And although literature, art, and music have been central to their practice, it is the political force of their films that matters most to them. Yet they have consistently explored radical strategies without operating under any illusions that formal radicalism has political efficacy. As Straub insisted in an interview with the political activist Joel Rogers in 1976:
In Paris nowadays nobody talks about anything but the deconstruction of cinematic language. . . . It’s indispensable, but not sufficient, a “necessary but not sufficient condition.”. . . I don’t fetishize the cinema at all. I think of it as an instrument, a tool. In History Lessons [1972], the film does not consist really of those parts of it that would interest someone like Michael Snow, for example. Above all, the film has a subject. And the reflection on the “language”—I’ll use that term although I don’t really believe in it—actually, reflection on the instrument, and the methods you use in the cinema, are only interesting because in History Lessons, for example, it is the story of a crisis of conscience. . . . You have to have methods of dividing. Dividing not only the public, but also the ways that you choose, the instruments that you choose. But if it’s only to divide cinema, to divide itself, that is not very interesting. That’s like the serpent biting its tail.1
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Most of the elements of the Straub-Huillet signature were in place even in the four films they made before 1970, during the decade in which they lived in Munich—Machorka-Muff; Nicht versöhnt oder Es hilft nur Gewalt, wo Gewalt herrscht (Not Reconciled, or Only Violence Helps Where Violence Rules, 1965); Chronik der Anna Magdalena Bach (Chronicle of Anna Magdalena Bach, 1968); and Der Bräutigam, die Komödiantin und der Zuhälter (The Bridegroom, the Actress, and the Pimp, 1968)—but it wasn’t until they relocated to Italy in 1969 and shot Les yeux ne veulent pas en tout temps se fermer ou Peut-être qu’un jour Rome se permettra de choisir à son tour (Eyes Do Not Want to Close at All Times, or Perhaps One Day Rome Will Permit Herself to Choose in Her Turn, 1970; commonly referred to as Othon) that they definitively moved beyond the frontier zone where ambitious cinema might have a chance at commercial success. None of their contemporaries in France (Godard, Rivette, Resnais, Varda) or in Germany (Kluge, Herzog, Fassbinder, Schlöndorff) were prepared to abandon conventional feature-film expectations so early. (Hans-Jürgen Syberberg was the exception, in this and in all else.) The six films (two shorts and four features) they made over the following decade—from Geschichtsunterricht (History Lessons) to Dalla nube alla resistenza (From the Cloud to the Resistance, 1979)—were all exceptionally demanding in their rigor and uncompromising in their eschewal of entertainment.
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